I installed qpdfview and liked it more than Evince. So I want to remove Evince. Is it advisable (as it is a core item in Ubuntu 14.04)?
Ubuntu – Is it advisable to remove Evince (Default Document Viewer)
evincepdf
evincepdf
I installed qpdfview and liked it more than Evince. So I want to remove Evince. Is it advisable (as it is a core item in Ubuntu 14.04)?
Best Answer
In your case, the program Evince was installed on your system as a component of the ubuntu-desktop metapackage. There are several excellent answers here about what a metapackage is and the implications of uninstalling a component of a metapackage and the metapackage itself. Here are two:
What is the difference between a meta-package and a package?
How to determine if a package is a meta-package from the command line?
Coming back to your case, if you run
apt-cache show ubuntu-desktop
and examine the output, you'll see a section called Depends:. This lists all the software, including Evince, specified by the ubuntu-desktop metapackage. If you attempt to uninstall any of the packages in that list, the ubuntu-desktop metapackage will also be uninstalled (along with other dependencies unique to the package you want to uninstall in the first place).Going further down, you'll see this:
In other words, sometime in the future, when you want to upgrade your system to the next permissible version of Ubuntu, the upgrade process will want to refer to the ubuntu-desktop metapackage. At that time, it will be advisable that you re-install ubuntu-desktop before undertaking the upgrade step. Until that time, not having ubuntu-desktop on your system doesn't mean you'll be without a "desktop"; its absence has no adverse day-to-day consequences.
As a precaution, the next time you want to uninstall anything, run a simulation first by leaving out
sudo
and by including-s
. For a really scary simulation, look at the output ofapt-get purge -s zenity
. Then, if you have doubts, you could research the matter as you did for Evince!